Lifeboat Foundation

Stephen Hawking’s suggestion that black holes “leak” radiation left physicists with a problem they have been attempting to solve for 51 years.

In what is arguably his most significant contribution to science, Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes can leak a form of radiation that causes them to gradually ebb away, and eventually end their lives in a massive explosive event.

This radiation 0, later called “Hawking radiation,” inadvertently causes a problem at the intersection of general relativity and quantum physics — the former being the best description we have of gravity and the universe on cosmically massive scales, while the latter is the most robust model of the physics that governs the very small.

Continue reading “What Happens When Black Holes Die?” »

On Sunday, Earth’s magnetic field was pelted by a solar wind stream reaching velocities of more than 600 kilometers (372 miles) per second.

While that’s nothing too alarming – solar storms often pummel our planet triggering spectacular auroras – what is weird is that this storm was totally unexpected.

“This event was not in the forecast, so the resulting auroras came as a surprise,” SpaceWeather reported.

Booster 7 and Ship 24 both conducted two spin prime tests, Ship 25 was welded in the High Bay, and the Chopsticks were raised.

Video and Pictures from Mary (@BocaChicaGal), Nic (@NicAnsuini), and the NSF Robots.
Edited by Patrick Colquhoun(@Patrick_Colqu).

Continue reading “Starship and Booster Engine Testing Double Header | SpaceX Boca Chica” »

Inventory of plants and animals could be used for modern conservation efforts.

For decades, if you asked a fusion scientist to picture a fusion reactor, they’d probably tell you about a tokamak. It’s a chamber about the size of a large room, shaped like a hollow doughnut. Physicists fill its insides with a not-so-tasty jam of superheated plasma. Then they surround it with magnets in the hopes of crushing atoms together to create energy, just as the sun does.

But experts think you can make tokamaks in other shapes. Some believe that making tokamaks smaller and leaner could make them better at handling plasma. If the fusion scientists proposing it are right, then it could be a long-awaited upgrade for nuclear energy. Thanks to recent research and a newly proposed reactor project, the field is seriously thinking about generating electricity with a “spherical tokamak.”

“The indication from experiments up to now is that [spherical tokamaks] may, pound for pound, confine plasmas better and therefore make better fusion reactors,” says Steven Cowley, director of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

After decades of inertial confinement fusion research, a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) was achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) National Ignition Facility (NIF) for the first time on Aug. 8, 2021, putting researchers at the threshold of fusion gain and achieving scientific ignition.

On the one-year anniversary of this historic achievement, the scientific results of this record experiment have been published in three peer-reviewed papers: one in Physical Review Letters and two in Physical Review E. More than 1,000 authors are included in one of the Physical Review Letters paper to recognize and acknowledge the many individuals who have worked over many decades to enable this significant advance.

“The record shot was a major scientific advance in fusion research, which establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible at NIF,” said Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for LLNL’s inertial confinement fusion program. “Achieving the conditions needed for ignition has been a long-standing goal for all inertial confinement fusion research and opens access to a new experimental regime where alpha-particle self-heating outstrips all the cooling mechanisms in the fusion plasma.”